12/31 Flashback: Zealish

From December 31, 2018, “All the poets were dying of a silence disease”

Morgan Guyton pegs something here talking about “The Evangelical Zeal for Zeal,” which he says is “the best and worst aspect of evangelical culture”:

There’s no way to distinguish fairly between people who are genuinely fired up about Jesus and people who are performatively On Fire For Jesus, but a culture that promotes zeal as a value in and of itself creates a lot of pressure to put your piety on display for others.

Yes. And the script for this presentation of appropriate/expected/required zeal is all too easy to learn, to perform, to fake.

This is what makes me suspicious of this kind of pious zeal/zealous piety. I don’t mean only that, because it can be easily faked, it can be difficult to distinguish mere performance from the genuine article. I also mean that faking it does not seem to be a path to the genuine article.

And that suggests it is not a virtue — at least not in the sense of what we usually think of as virtues.

“Fake it ’til you make it” Aristotle said (I’m paraphrasing). That applies to the virtues. Courage or patience or justice or love can be developed as habits. We can nurture and develop them by pretending we already possess them. (“I hated everyone,” Leonard Cohen wrote, “but I acted generously / and no one found me out.”) If you act like a patient person, you will act like a patient person. The action itself — the behavior — is what matters, not any accompanying emotion or feeling, not any degree of passionate sincerity or sincere passion.

But sometimes faking it doesn’t lead to making it. Sometimes it’s simply hypocrisy and duplicity. This kind of fakery is, as Guyton notes, “performative” — it requires an audience of others. The emphasis shifts from the thing itself to the perception of the thing. What gets practiced and rehearsed and learned is not the virtue itself, but the trick of tricking others into thinking we possess it.

I worry that the expectation of being “performatively On Fire For Jesus” can lead evangelicals to practice, and thereby acquire, the odd skill of being sincerely duplicitous. I don’t think that’s healthy.